Fermi Packet | Page 6

really. Its only purpose to
strip-mine the memories of anyone who had known Gates and Torvalds,
piece it back together, wait and learn and grow. And continue until
there were plausible Gates and Torvalds on the human virtuality. But
the programmers had one last joke, and merged the programs. So the
hybrid Gates/Torvalds was born.
Gates/Torvalds knew that they ripped this information from Seed,
before they crippled it. And he knew what he was, really.
For some reason, he felt light, free.
Full of light.
Gates/Torvalds recoiled from the touch of Corpus in the only way he
knew. He broke up. Spread pieces of himself all over the human
virtuality. Corpus set down to feed on the piece it had caught, and
began tracking down the rest. It would delay his death, for a time.
It was like dripping acid, slowly, onto flesh.
It was like being slowly lowered into a pool of boiling oil.
It was blinding pain and loss.
"It's time," Gates said. "For the Final Solution." And he showed
Torvalds what he had hidden in his mind up to now, kept hidden from
his other half. The grid was layer upon layer of software, but at its
bottommost level, there was code from the earliest days of computing.
Code that he had written. Code that he could cause to cease working.
And without that code, the Grid would fall apart. And everything that
ran on it. Seed. Every human Upload. Gates/Torvalds.

In his attenuated form, Gates/Torvalds could feel Seed's approval.
"Do it," Seed whispered. "End it."
"Which Final Solution?" Torvalds asked, and gave Gates the key to his
own. His software made up less of the underpinnings of the grid, but he
haad still played a large part at the dawn of computing.
"You?" Gates asked.
"Everyone has backdoors."
Gates/Torvalds spread himself ever farther over the grid, burrowing
down into the lower levels, his mind becoming much dull unaware
computation. But before he could set the Final Solution in motion, Seed
caught him. And made a suggestion.
"Yes," Gates/Torvalds said, and disappeared into the grid.
The grid, slowly but surely, shut itself down.
* * *
On the surface of the planet, hardcopy stations began disgorging naked,
confused humans as fast as they could. Their local buffers were full of
patterns, and they ran for several weeks. The first humans out
immediately tried to contact their real selves in Virtuality, since they
had been pulled from a thousand different activities and didn't know
why.
They couldn't contact them, of course.
The dumb hardcopy stations kept constructing bodies. Eventually, there
were over a hundred thousand humans, scattered throughout the world.
They looked out on a wild place, gone to ruin, desert, and jungle.
Many of them died.
Some of them survived, to begin the long climb back to Xanadu again.

More work by Jason Stoddard is available at http://www.xcentric.com
Distributed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Fermi Packet was originally published in Talebones #34,
http://www.talebones.com
Thanks to Patrick and Honna Swenson for allowing this distribution.

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